Rest assured, your mom meant well. But she might have been unwittingly throwing you onto a self-destructive path to compulsive overeating. But hey! No harm, no foul — only diabetes, heart disease and high cholesterol, right?
I’m exaggerating, but what’s a little hyperbole among friends? Maybe I should explain before I start throwing punches, accusations and yo’ mama jokes. Well, here we go:
Overeating is like having to fire somebody. When you first try it out, it sucks. It’s gut-wrenching, time slows down, you start to tear up a little and you wish you could take everything back because what are they going to do now? Your stomach and your employee’s adorable children all cry out for mercy, but you have to do it — otherwise you don’t get dessert.
After a few more times through, it gets easier. You gradually grow numb to the desperate, helpless whining of your unsettled stomach/suddenly unemployed underling. Enough gorging yourself or corporate downsizing and you’ll stop feeling even the slightest twinge of guilt or bloated nausea. You even start enjoying it.
Allow me to illustrate: Once upon a time I was in Spain, living with a wonderfully grumpy lady who liked to make fun of my Spanish and regularly scold me for the way I dressed myself.
But when she wasn’t busy making my study-abroad experience the amazing, life-changing, paradigm-rattling, blah yadda blah, multiculturalism, etc. experience that it was, she liked to make me and my roommates enormous meals of ham and/or mayonnaise and/or olive oil. (Spanish national diet in a greasy nutshell. Drenched in gazpacho.)
Naturally, she stuffed us like burritos — which is odd, because few people in Spain even know what a burrito is. At first I was acutely aware of my appetite, wincing with every superfluous spoonful of lentils and fried pork I shoveled down my convulsive oropharynx, anxiously attempting to act with some semblance of courtesy for my host mother. (She really was great, I promise.)
It got easier later on, but I realized something had changed inside me once I left Spain and returned to the land of more reasonable portion sizes. (France. Not America by any means.)
Conditioned to turn off my satiation signals like silencing a phone, I found myself overeating by default. I would try to listen to my appetite and gauge my hunger, but it was like looking for gelatin in a ball pit — by which I mean challenging, and a far bit more slimy and queasy than a needle in a haystack.
